Catching the Early Birds

Location
Yandina Queensland
Equipment
Zoom F4
Sennheiser MKH 60
Boom pole array
 
I finally managed to get myself out of bed early enough to record some of the early morning bird sounds around the Noosa area. I am terrible at waking up early and even when I have a really good reason to do so I find it hard. Today I was up at 4.30am and headed out to walk around the local area. As I had observed before many of the birds in Noosa seem to live around the residential areas rather than in the national park. I suspect it’s because the trees in peoples gardens might be more desirable to them, and also the possibility of food being available where people are living. Either way it had been difficult to record the many birds during the day as people and cars usually contaminated the recordings. 4.30am gave me far fewer people to compete with.
 
I started out just walking around the residential streets of Noosa Heads. There were quite a few Brush Turkeys wandering around. The turkeys don’t really have any bird calls, but they do produce a low grunting sound when they run around. They often fight amongst themselves so it was easy to capture some of the sounds as they wandered the streets. I also got some nice clean recordings of a family of magpies. The adults were making the typical magpie calls while the young were making their usual pleading squawk when they want to be fed. While magpies are certainly not limited to Noosa this was the first chance I had had to get a clean recording the usual urban habitats that I see them in are far too noisy.

Noosa Corellas

Closer to the waterfront I saw what I initially thought were Sulphur Crested Cockatoos, but I found out later they were Corellas. There were quite a few of them up in a large tree and I recorded a fair bit of material. A lot of it is mixed with Lorikeets as well, but I still got some good samples. I managed to get some other bird sounds that I have yet to identify, but I unfortunately missed out on recording the green catbirds that are in the area. They produce a sound that is a lot like a human baby crying. I did hear one way off in the brush, but I had no way to get closer and it was too far off to be worth recording. That one can go on the wish list for later. Overall it was an excellent mornings recording and well worth the pain of having to get up early. Anyway after I got back we went to the Market and I had Dutch pancakes for breakfast so that was good too.

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